Conventional furniture designed for use in educational or business settings has become increasingly modular in nature in which a limited number of discrete furniture elements may be combined in various combinations to generate a variety of configurations. Accordingly, the expense and delay associated with procuring custom furniture for a particular application can be reduced substantially. Further, as the needs of an educational provider or employer change, the furniture elements may be reconfigured and additional elements procured as necessary. For example, a plurality of rectangular furniture elements can be used on one occasion to provide parallel rows of table surfaces for student seating during lectures. On another occasion, the rectangular elements may be arranged to provide a large square or rectangular work surface for a group meeting or discussion.
A desirable feature of such furniture elements is that a substantially contiguous work surface can be produced without gaps or other substantial discontinuities. Accordingly, a fundamental characteristic of such furniture is that each of the furniture elements shares a common feature, such as a lineal dimension of a mating surface. For example, a rectangular element may have a short side dimension of one unit and a long side dimension of two units. By mating the short sides of two such elements together, a large contiguous rectangular work surface may be generated having a short side dimension of one unit and a long side dimension of four units. Alternatively, by mating the long sides of two such elements together, a large contiguous square work surface may be generated having a common side dimension of two units. Other common polygonal furniture elements, such as those which are trapezoidal, pentagonal, hexagonal, or octagonal in shape, may be used in combination with other polygonal furniture elements to create extended work surfaces comprising a series of clustered work surfaces connected by linking work surfaces. Exemplary embodiments of such configurations are depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 5,016,405 issued to Lee, the disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.
Another type of modular furniture element may employ mating surfaces which are contoured or arcuate instead of linear, such as those depicted in U.S. Pat. No. 3,714,906 issued to Finestone, U.S. Pat. No. 3,955,850 issued to Toso, and U.S. Pat. No. Des. 373,915 issued to Lobl et al., the disclosures of which are herein incorporated by reference in their entirety. According to these designs, an outwardly extending contour of one furniture element mates with a recessed contour of another furniture element. Applications include work surfaces, such as tables, and seating, such as armchairs and divans. U.S. Pat. No. 5,438,937 issued to Ball et al., the disclosure of which is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety, incorporates furniture elements in a system which utilizes both lineal and arcuate mating surfaces.
While such furniture may function as intended, the relative orientation of one element to the next is substantially fixed due to the restrictive nature of the mating surfaces. For example, as discussed hereinabove with respect to the example of the two rectangular elements, solely two configurations are possible, namely a long rectangular table or a large square table. No other combination is possible in which the mating surfaces abut to generate a substantially contiguous surface. In other words, solely a finite number of furniture configurations are possible, based upon the discrete number of different furniture elements and the number and type of mating surfaces. For furniture which incorporates a uniform circular element, while a mating arcuate element may be oriented relative thereto at substantially any angular orientation, such reorientation does not change the external configuration of the combination. For example, solely one combination can be made of a circular table element and a rectangular table element with a matching arcuate recess, regardless of the relative angular orientation of the circular element relative to the rectangular element.